Three days into the bidding the high offer had already eclipsed the record price ever paid for a rare game - $20,100 for a Nintendo Campus Challenge cartridge sold last fall by Denver entrepreneur J.J. Hendricks, who earlier in 2009 also paid $17,500 for a gold Nintendo World Championships cart.

"I was pretty amazed at the price," Hendricks told Kotaku. "This Stadium Events auction destroys the previous record and I think is a surprise to everyone in game collecting community. I just wish there was such a thing as a sealed Nintendo World Championships Gold."

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Hendricks said he did not bid on the sealed Stadium Events box. "I thought about it briefly but the bidding quickly went beyond what I was willing to pay," he said. "I'm not that into sealed game collecting."

Bidding surged in the final 18 hours of the Stadium Events auction, nearly doubling the price from $22,500 to its final amount. Much of that was attributable to a single user bidding it up unopposed 35 times in a 10-minute span early this morning - from $22,700 to $39,800 - before leaving the auction. In all, more than 100 bids were placed on the item.

The NTSC version of Stadium Events is believed to be one of the rarest games ever; fewer than 20 copies of the game, only one of them factory-sealed, were known to have existed before last week's auction began. Its rarity is owed to the fact the rights to it and its dedicated controller, what later became the Nintendo Power Pad, changed hands to Nintendo soon after its limited 1987 release in North America.

Hendricks' World Championships Cart was one of 26 prizes given out during a 1990 promotion by Nintendo Power magazine. The Campus Challenge cart is the only original copy in the world known to exist.

Interestingly, Hendricks points out that another copy of Stadium Events - apparently factory sealed in its listing photo, but not described as such in the headline - is currently selling for far less. The latest bid on this version was $7,300 with a little less than three days remaining.